FILMMAKING FREEDOM
Elton John biopic takes liberties
CANNES “You’ve made a young man from Aberystwyth incredibly happy, and you’ve made a 72-year-old rock star even more happy.”
That’s Welsh actor Taron Egerton facing the press after the Cannes première of Rocketman, a musical biopic that covers “the troughs as well as the peaks” of the man born Reginald Kenneth Dwight, though better known to the world as Elton Hercules John.
John was also in Cannes for the world première of the film. After the screening, he performed I’m Still Standing before ceding the stage to Egerton (who does his own singing in the film) for a performance of the movie’s title song. Rocketman even closes with a musical number on the beach in the French seaside resort town, a bit of pandering I can only refer to as “Cannes-dering.”
Egerton, moved to tears during the screening and almost again in the news conference, said he is proud to call John his friend after working closely with him on the film.
“I’ve prepared by being with him,” Egerton says. “You really can ask him anything. He’ll tell you everything. Not a lot makes him blush.”
As opposed to the more traditional biopic structure of the recent Freddie Mercury film Bohemian Rhapsody — which has drawn inevitable comparisons, not least because Rocketman director Dexter Fletcher stepped in to finish that film as well — Rocketman plays more like a live-theatre jukebox musical brought to the screen. Songs are played for emotional beats rather than factual ones, and the film imagines John walking out on a Madison Square Garden concert to check into rehab, still dressed in one of his outrageous stage costumes, although even that is inspired by his wardrobe rather than being a perfect copy.
“It’s not that we didn’t do our homework,” said Egerton. “We’re trying to be authentically creative.”
Rocketman doesn’t shy away from John’s excesses — we see him drinking heavily, taking copious amounts of drugs and owning up to the fact that he “f---ed anything that moved.” But Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays John’s mother in the film, remarked on the joyous fact that despite all this (and unlike many musical biopics), John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin (played by Jamie Bell) are still alive and well.
“There was none of that loss,” she said. “There was only celebration at the end.” John has been sober for the past 25 years.
Howard said she relied on Egerton and Fletcher to help her through the process of creating her character as more than a one-dimensional parent. “Even one on one, me and Elton, we wouldn’t have got to that place,” she said. “No one wants to talk s--t about their mother.”
While most of the questions in Cannes were directed at Egerton, British journalists were aware of the fact that Scottish actor Richard Madden, who plays John’s former manager and one-time lover John Reid, has been pegged as a possible replacement for Daniel Craig as James Bond.
“It’s very flattering to be involved in that conversation at all,” Madden replied diplomatically. “But it’s all just talk. I’m sure next week it’ll be someone different.”
At which point Egerton leaned forward into his microphone and began cheekily humming the Bond theme song: “Dum-diddle-umdum, bum bum bum dum-diddleum dum ...”
It wasn’t Rocketman or Your Song, but the crowd lapped it up. cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknightfilm
Rocketman was directed by Dexter Fletcher, the guy who stepped in to finish Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer was fired late in production. But it stands as evidence that there is clearly more than one way to tell the life story of a famous, flamboyant musician.
BoRap, as the kids are calling it, gave us the standard biopic beats of Freddie Mercury, Oscar winningly portrayed by Rami Malek. Rocketman features Taron Egerton ably imitating not only the mannerisms but the voice of the man born Reginald Kenneth Dwight, who later changed his name to Elton Hercules John.
The film suggests Elton grabbed his last name from a rock band poster, and that he might as easily have been named Elton Ringo. That’s probably not true — popular lore suggests it was a tribute to singer Long John Baldry — but it’s hardly the biggest departure from the biographical truth in a movie that plays fast and loose with chronology and even causality: One scene imagines Elton giving his younger self a hug. In fact, the best way to picture Rocketman is to imagine a live, jukebox musical about the singer’s life that welds vast numbers of greatest hits to whatever moments in his life seems the best fit — and then to imagine the movie version of that.
So we have 2001’s I Want Love sung by young Elton and his whole family — Bryce Dallas Howard gets almost unrecognizably haggard to play his troubled mom — while The Bitch is Back sees a prepubescent Elton (Matthew Illesley), performing on the streets around his suburban London childhood home, and Crocodile Rock from 1973 is the song he uses to instantly woo the crowds at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, on his first trip to the U.S. — in 1970.
We’re on firmer biographical ground with Elton’s associates and confidantes, not least his longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin (an easygoing Jamie Bell) and his manager and (for a time) lover John Reid, played by Richard Madden as the closest thing Rocketman has to a villain. Mind you, Elton was often his own worst enemy, going through a period of the kind of drug use, alcoholism and general licentious behaviour that could (and sometimes did) end a rock star’s life. The film imagines him skipping out on a concert at Madison Square Garden to check himself into therapy without even taking off his stage costume first. And who knew you could turn a stomach-pump procedure into yet another dance number?
What it comes down to is that Rocketman is a film first and foremost for the fans. If you know the music and the general outline of his life, sexuality, etc., you can slip into the story and just tap your feet to the music. In fact, you can tell everybody that this is your song. If on the other hand you want the historical truth with maybe some deep psychological probing, well then I guess that why they call it the blues.